Dec. 07, 2012

Unlocking a Lake’s Bacterial Secrets, Beneath 20 Meters of Ice

Lake Vida, in one of Antarctica’s dry valleys, was once thought to be frozen solid. In 1995, researchers discovered the lake wasn’t completely ice -- inside an almost 20-meter-thick ice layer lay veins of super-salty water, sealed off from the rest of the world. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Alison Murray and colleagues describe a community of bacteria that survive in the dark, salty, sub-freezing waters of the lake.